Politics and Demonstrations

[andrewducker]

I'm a fan of democracy. I think that First Past The Post is a grossly unfair system that causes all sorts of iniquities.

I've been very happy by the surge of interest in Proportional Representation, and been paying keen attention to the demonstrations organised over the last couple of weeks.

I didn't make it to the one in Glasgow last weekend, so when one came up in Edinburgh this weekend I was delighted that I'd get the chance to go along. When they asked for volunteers to help out with stewarding I was very happy to offer to help out.

Only now I'm hearing that the organisers changed their petition retroactively from "Voting Reform" to "Proportional Representation", and that (a) some of the people that signed up aren't actually supporters of full PR and (b) changing the words on a petition after it's been signed really isn't on.

However, the only place I've seen this so far is on a couple of friend's Facebook updates. I've not seen any discussion anywhere else, and I'd quite like to know whether there's some kind of misunderstanding, an individual doing something stupid, or an attempt at hijacking a mass movement going on.

Does anyone have any information they could share? Because I'd love to go along and get involved tomorrow, but I don't want to be party to unfair unscrupulous behaviour.

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I think it's worth remembering a couple of things:

1. Take Back Parliament didn't organise the demo tomorrow. We did. Everyone who's going, everyone who's helping out.

2. I think that if the petition has been reworded - and honestly I wouldn't know - it will have been reworded not to screw over those who signed it but to clarify that AV is not PR - something that every bloody newspaper in the country seems to think, and something that I suspect the Tories would very much like people to think. While I agree that it's principally and practically not cool to change the wording of a petition after the fact, I suspect that if it was changed it didn't even begin to cross the minds of the organisers that the signatories would mind. I don't think anyone was trying to be sinister or put one over on anybody else. The worst they're going to be guilty of is thoughtlessness.

The blog on the Take Back Parliament website has an entry about AV being good but not enough. I can't find the reference that Matthew claims says they now stand only for Proportional Representation without individual constituency MPs - presumably meaning STV in preference to any mixed-member system.

Matthew's objection to PR seems to be founded specifically on the concept that marginalises rural areas which is just a fiction - the maths can be worked to say that, but in practice it's just bollocks, and due to the political make-up of rural areas in Britain PR will actually boost their representation. The only way that rural areas would suffer would be if they happened to all vote for one of the Big Two, since they're the ones who're going to lose votes. So rural England may lose some representation (but I think they'll still manage all right somehow) - overwhelmingly Lib Dem/SNP rural Scotland are going to have better representation whichever way you slice it.

Finally, as you know, I'm in favour of mixed-member PR. Most of the demo last Sat was spent discussing different forms of PR, their merits and flaws, and the ones we thought might apply best to Britain. The overwhelming feeling was that what we wanted to see was simply Fair Votes For All, and that frankly the exact details we'd be happy to have worked out later. I'd be very, very surprised if that wasn't still the mentality of most of the people campaigning across the country tomorrow - whatever their website does or doesn't say.